likewise, the percept ‘red’ is too simple and low-level to be explained in terms of anything else
The simplicity of qualia is subjective. Which isn’t surprising,because qualia are subjective. But it’s still different from the simplicity of “0”, which doesn’t require any particular context.
The subjective simplicity is unsurprising from some perspectives. A complete drill down would be equivalent to looking at a fine grained brain scan of your own brain....but you need to have much more information about the external world than your brain state for survival purposes.
ETA
The problem is not the incompatibility of qualia, which is only.subjective anyway, but the predictability of qualia. If qualia could be reduced to (and therefore predicted from) physics, they would be compressible because physics is.
Even if ones own brain prevents one from predicting or compressing qualia, there should be no problem in predicting or compressing qualia the of other people … so long as qualia are an ordinary physical phenomenon. That’s the intuition that the Mary’s Room thought experiment explores. But qualia appear not to be an ordinary physical phenomenon—there are no qualiometers, so we can’t detect someone else’s qualia. But it qualia are intrinsically subjective, only epistemically accessible to the person having them, that is what is strange and special about them., since all (other) physical phenomena are objective.
So the incompressibility of qualia is “merely” subjective, but subjectivity isn’t mere!
Hmm. I’m not sure if we disagree? I agree that the incompressibility of qualia is relative to a given perspective(or to be a bit pedantic, I would say that qualia themselves are only defined relative to a perspective) By incompressible, I mean incompressible to the brain’s coding mechanism. This is enough to explain the meta-hard problem, as it is our brain’s particular coding mechanism that causes us to report that qualia seem inexplicable physically.
So the incompressibility of qualia is “merely” subjective, but subjectivity isn’t mere
I also think I might agree here? The way I have come to think about it is like this: the point of world-models is to explain our experiences. But in the course of actually building and refining those models, we forget this and think instead that the point is instead to reduce everything to the model, even our experiences(because this is often a good heuristic in the usual course of improving our world-model). This is analogous to the string-compressing robot who thinks that its string-compressing program is more “real” than the string it is attempting to compress. I think the solution is to simply accept that experiences and physics occupy different slots in our ontology and we shouldn’t expect to reduce either to the other.
By incompressible, I mean incompressible to the brain’s coding mechanism
So is 0, but no one worries about that. There’s more to mysterious incompressibility than incompressibility...you also need the expectation that something should be compressible. Physical reductionism has the implication that high level phenomena should be compressible, and that qualia are high level phenomena. The incompressibility of 0 or a quark isn’t a problem to physical reductionism, because it can safely regard them as basic.
as it is our brain’s particular coding mechanism that causes us to report that qualia seem inexplicable physically.
If there were an objective account of how qualia are reducible, then the subjective judgement wouldn’t matter. There is an objective account of other mental phenomena. If the answer to some question “just pops into our head”, we can understand objectively how it could have been generated by a computation, even though the fine neurological details are veiled subjectively.
I think the solution is to simply accept that experiences and physics occupy different slots in our ontology and we shouldn’t expect to reduce either to the other.
So, dualism is true? For the dualist, there is no expectation that qualia should be compressible or reducible.
But that’s not a meta-explanation. It’s just an object level explanation that isn’t physicalism.
The incompressibility of 0 or a quark isn’t a problem to physical reductionism
I actually do think some people register these being incompressible as a problem. Think of “what breathes fire into the equations” or “why does anything exist at all”(OK, more about the incompressibility of the entire world than a quark, but same idea—I could imagine people being confused about “what even are quarks in themselves” or something...)
So, dualism is true? For the dualist, there is no expectation that qualia should be compressible or reducible. But that’s not a meta-explanation
We can distinguish two levels of analysis.
firstly, accepting a naïve physicalism, we can try to give an account of why people would report being confused about consciousness, which could in principle be cashed out in purely physical predictions about what words they speak or symbols they type into computers. That’s what I was attempting to do in the first two sections of the article(without spelling out in detail how the algorithms ultimately lead to typing etc., given that I don’t think the details are especially important for the overall point) I think people with a variety of metaphysical views could come to agree on an explanation of this “meta-problem” without coming to agree on the object level.
Secondly, there is the question of how to relate that analysis to our first-person perspective. This was what I was trying to do in the last section of the article(which I also feel much less confident in than the first two sections). You could say it’s dualist in a sense, although I don’t think there “is” a non-physical mental substance or anything like that. I would rather say that reality, from the perspective of beings like us, is necessarily a bit indexical—that is, one always approaches reality from a particular perspective. You can enlarge your perspective, but not so much that you attain an observer-independent overview of all of reality. Qualia are a manifestation of this irreducible indexicality.
I actually do think some people register these being incompressible as a problem. Think of “what breathes fire into the equations
If the equations are something like string theory or the standard model, they are pretty complex, and there is a legitimate concern why you can compress things so far but not further.
firstly, accepting a naïve physicalism, we can try to give an account of why people would report being confused about consciousness, which could in principle be cashed out in purely physical predictions about what words they speak or symbols they type into computers
But there is no reason for the maximally naive person to be confused about qualia, because the maximally naive person doesn’t know what they are, or what physics is or what reductionism is. The maximally naive approach is that I am looking at a red chair, and I see it exactly as it is, and the redness is a property of the chair ,not a proxy representation generated in my brain.
I think people with a variety of metaphysical views could come to agree on an explanation of this “meta-problem” without coming to agree on the object level.
Sure. A physicalist could say that the the hard problem is the problem of explaining qualia on physical terms ,at the meta level, and the obvious object level solution is to ditch qualia.
Whereas an idealistist could agree that the the hard problem is the problem of explaining qualia on physical terms ,at the meta level, but say that the obvious object level solution is to ditch physicalism.
I would rather say that reality, from the perspective of beings like us, is necessarily a bit indexical—that is, one always approaches reality from a particular perspective.
Physicalism admits perspectives, but not irreducible ones. Under relativity, things will seem different to different observers, but in a way that is predictable to any observer. Albert can predict someone else’s observations of mass, length and time....but can Mary predict someone else’s colour qualia?
The simplicity of qualia is subjective. Which isn’t surprising,because qualia are subjective. But it’s still different from the simplicity of “0”, which doesn’t require any particular context.
The subjective simplicity is unsurprising from some perspectives. A complete drill down would be equivalent to looking at a fine grained brain scan of your own brain....but you need to have much more information about the external world than your brain state for survival purposes. ETA
The problem is not the incompatibility of qualia, which is only.subjective anyway, but the predictability of qualia. If qualia could be reduced to (and therefore predicted from) physics, they would be compressible because physics is.
Even if ones own brain prevents one from predicting or compressing qualia, there should be no problem in predicting or compressing qualia the of other people … so long as qualia are an ordinary physical phenomenon. That’s the intuition that the Mary’s Room thought experiment explores. But qualia appear not to be an ordinary physical phenomenon—there are no qualiometers, so we can’t detect someone else’s qualia. But it qualia are intrinsically subjective, only epistemically accessible to the person having them, that is what is strange and special about them., since all (other) physical phenomena are objective.
So the incompressibility of qualia is “merely” subjective, but subjectivity isn’t mere!
Hmm. I’m not sure if we disagree? I agree that the incompressibility of qualia is relative to a given perspective(or to be a bit pedantic, I would say that qualia themselves are only defined relative to a perspective) By incompressible, I mean incompressible to the brain’s coding mechanism. This is enough to explain the meta-hard problem, as it is our brain’s particular coding mechanism that causes us to report that qualia seem inexplicable physically.
I also think I might agree here? The way I have come to think about it is like this: the point of world-models is to explain our experiences. But in the course of actually building and refining those models, we forget this and think instead that the point is instead to reduce everything to the model, even our experiences(because this is often a good heuristic in the usual course of improving our world-model). This is analogous to the string-compressing robot who thinks that its string-compressing program is more “real” than the string it is attempting to compress. I think the solution is to simply accept that experiences and physics occupy different slots in our ontology and we shouldn’t expect to reduce either to the other.
So is 0, but no one worries about that. There’s more to mysterious incompressibility than incompressibility...you also need the expectation that something should be compressible. Physical reductionism has the implication that high level phenomena should be compressible, and that qualia are high level phenomena. The incompressibility of 0 or a quark isn’t a problem to physical reductionism, because it can safely regard them as basic.
If there were an objective account of how qualia are reducible, then the subjective judgement wouldn’t matter. There is an objective account of other mental phenomena. If the answer to some question “just pops into our head”, we can understand objectively how it could have been generated by a computation, even though the fine neurological details are veiled subjectively.
So, dualism is true? For the dualist, there is no expectation that qualia should be compressible or reducible. But that’s not a meta-explanation. It’s just an object level explanation that isn’t physicalism.
I actually do think some people register these being incompressible as a problem. Think of “what breathes fire into the equations” or “why does anything exist at all”(OK, more about the incompressibility of the entire world than a quark, but same idea—I could imagine people being confused about “what even are quarks in themselves” or something...)
We can distinguish two levels of analysis.
firstly, accepting a naïve physicalism, we can try to give an account of why people would report being confused about consciousness, which could in principle be cashed out in purely physical predictions about what words they speak or symbols they type into computers. That’s what I was attempting to do in the first two sections of the article(without spelling out in detail how the algorithms ultimately lead to typing etc., given that I don’t think the details are especially important for the overall point) I think people with a variety of metaphysical views could come to agree on an explanation of this “meta-problem” without coming to agree on the object level.
Secondly, there is the question of how to relate that analysis to our first-person perspective. This was what I was trying to do in the last section of the article(which I also feel much less confident in than the first two sections). You could say it’s dualist in a sense, although I don’t think there “is” a non-physical mental substance or anything like that. I would rather say that reality, from the perspective of beings like us, is necessarily a bit indexical—that is, one always approaches reality from a particular perspective. You can enlarge your perspective, but not so much that you attain an observer-independent overview of all of reality. Qualia are a manifestation of this irreducible indexicality.
If the equations are something like string theory or the standard model, they are pretty complex, and there is a legitimate concern why you can compress things so far but not further.
But there is no reason for the maximally naive person to be confused about qualia, because the maximally naive person doesn’t know what they are, or what physics is or what reductionism is. The maximally naive approach is that I am looking at a red chair, and I see it exactly as it is, and the redness is a property of the chair ,not a proxy representation generated in my brain.
Sure. A physicalist could say that the the hard problem is the problem of explaining qualia on physical terms ,at the meta level, and the obvious object level solution is to ditch qualia.
Whereas an idealistist could agree that the the hard problem is the problem of explaining qualia on physical terms ,at the meta level, but say that the obvious object level solution is to ditch physicalism.
Physicalism admits perspectives, but not irreducible ones. Under relativity, things will seem different to different observers, but in a way that is predictable to any observer. Albert can predict someone else’s observations of mass, length and time....but can Mary predict someone else’s colour qualia?